Digital garden

This is my digital garden, a place for my ideas to grow and be harvested. You might find the following resources useful:

The basics

  • The seen and the unseen Dissoi Logoi is a rhetorical exercise of unknown authorship, most likely dating to just after the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) based on comments within the exercise’s text. It starts on page 2 in the attached PDF.
  • The market is a process not a product. “Order Defined in the Process of its Emergence” James Buchanan

The limits of knowledge in machine learning

Discounting and time

Information and firms

Power laws

Some basics of tech

Economics of AI

Robots and workers

Zero priced goods

Platform economics

Space

Project Horizon was a 1959 study to determine the feasibility of constructing a scientific / military base on the Moon, at a time when the U.S. Department of the Army, Department of the Navy, and Department of the Air Force had total responsibility for U.S. space program plans. Horizon never progressed past the feasibility stage, being rejected by President Dwight Eisenhower when primary responsibility for America’s space program was transferred to the civilian agency NASA.

  • Volume I: Summary and Supporting Considerations
  • Volume II: Technical Considerations and Plans

Cosmic Train Schedule

Three space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made. These have been scanned and are available here as small, medium, large, and publication quality jpeg images.

Threat, Haven, or Fantasy? US Moon Base Concepts from 1959 to 2020 and Beyond | by Adeene Denton | Medium

Defense

In 1962 the United States conducted its final atmospheric nuclear test series, Operation Dominic. The absolute final bomb was Ripple II, test 2. This article pulls everything we know about the test, which still remains classified. There is a lot of evidence that it was a pure fusion device, which has only been theorized.

A Review of Criticality Accidents

Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving US Nuclear Weapons 1950-1989

Space-based ballistic missile defense: a multidimensional analysis (1985) | Hacker News

On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. A report of the General Accounting office, GAO/IMTEC-92-26, entitled Patriot Missile Defense: Software Problem Led to System Failure at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia reported on the cause of the failure. It turns out that the cause was an inaccurate calculation of the time since boot due to computer arithmetic errors. Specifically, the time in tenths of second as measured by the system’s internal clock was multiplied by 1/10 to produce the time in seconds.

[The Fishback ramjet revisited](* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521005804)

https://lilium.com/newsroom-detail/technology-behind-the-lilium-jet

DARPA’s investment strategy follows a portfolio approach. Reaching for outsized impact means taking on risk, and high risk in pursuit of high payoff is a hallmark of DARPA’s programs. They are listed here. Past DARPA research programs can be viewed in the Past Programs Archive.

Public policy is about making fewer bad choices

Public policy and wicked problems

The public policy process demystified

Selected tech policy topics

DARPA

NASA and space

The economics of privacy

Freedom of speech

My other work

So far this year, I’ve been thinking about excessive veto power, the value of time and discounting, technological atonement, when an online community migrates, the Millennial wealth gap, short-termism, the rural broadband penalty, COVID-19 and the relocalization of politics, the Spence distortion, and that Noam Chomsky signed the Harper’s Magazine letter.